sculpture
Any actual sporting art on show?Thursday, 31 May 2012
There’s a lot of art currently happening under the wing of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The common denominator, if there is one, is showstopping ambition and the concept of the inclusive spectacle. What there isn’t much of, whisper it softly,... Read more... |
Ron Mueck, Hauser & WirthFriday, 20 April 2012
Yesterday I fell in love with a black boy less than half my age and half my size – or, rather, a sculpture of a black boy. At just over two feet tall, Ron Mueck’s Youth is utterly beguiling. His silken skin, slender fingers, low-slung jeans and... Read more... |
theASHtray: Bruce Chatwin, The Doors, and an Easter break in the West CountrySaturday, 14 April 2012
On the tip-off of an art-loving West Country amigo, Miss April and I took a day out of our Easter hols to visit the recently re-opened Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, in Exeter.We’d missed the exhibition of French and British... Read more... |
Caro at Chatsworth, Chatsworth HouseSunday, 08 April 2012
The first and most unusual aspect of Caro at Chatsworth is that it is there: 15 outstanding sculptures by Sir Anthony Caro, placed in an irregular pattern around the formal 950ft early-18th-century Canal Pond, situated facing the southern vista... Read more... |
Mixed Media, Haunch of VenisonMonday, 05 March 2012
Group shows can be strained: the rubric can be so narrow that it has to be stretched to accommodate the artists at hand. That is one reason why Haunch of Venison's new show, Mixed Media, is so pleasing: it features contemporary sculpture with an... Read more... |
The Rodin Project, Russell Maliphant Company, Sadler's WellsMonday, 06 February 2012
Like a bleached Mount Parnassus for the gods, pouring linen down steep slopes in foaming white rivers, streaming white curtains up into heaven, few stage sets I’ve seen for a dance piece have been as captivatingly gorgeous as Es Devlin and Bronia... Read more... |
Jane McAdam Freud: Lucian Freud My Father, Freud MuseumThursday, 26 January 2012
In one small room of the Freud Museum, which was once the home of Sigmund in the last year of his life, are the works Jane McAdam Freud made in the final months of her father’s life. Below an imposing photograph of Freud the elder, the progenitor of... Read more... |
Survivor, Hofesh Shechter & Anthony Gormley, Barbican TheatreFriday, 13 January 2012
Empty vessels make the most noise. That pithy old aphorism floated into my head a scant few minutes into the much-heralded new work by the undoubtedly talented, but here way off-beam, Hofesh Shechter. And again, a few minutes later. And again, and... Read more... |
Anselm Kiefer: Il Mistero delle Cattedrali, White Cube BermondseyTuesday, 13 December 2011
That Anselm Kiefer is one of the great elder statesmen of contemporary art goes without saying. His work’s precise relevance to now is less clear. In the early 1980s, when he sprang to fame as part of the New Image Painting phenomenon (with Schnabel... Read more... |
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, EdinburghFriday, 09 December 2011
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has been transformed with a £7.6 million facelift. As a first-timer I confess I don’t have a clue what it looked like before, but I am assured it was dark and gloomy and had the air of a building cast aside in... Read more... |
Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Institute of Contemporary ArtsMonday, 28 November 2011
In his catalogue essay, Peter Osborne discusses the meaning of epithets such as “new” and “contemporary” when applied to current art, yet no one in this year’s New Contemporaries seems to be striving to make work that is “new”, “different”, “radical... Read more... |
Paul McCarthy: The King, The Island, The Train, The House, The Ship, Hauser & WirthFriday, 18 November 2011
Until recently, on YouTube, you could watch Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s Heidi (1992), one of the funniest and most transgressive videos ever made. In a Swiss chalet, the children Heidi and Peter are being “educated” by their abusive grandfather... Read more... |
